Dust

Dust has had a mixed status, from the worthless dust we shook from our sandals as we left town to gold dust and pixie dust. Until the 19th century it was surprisingly important. It was the limit of the small. And, writes cultural historian Joseph Amato, in the old days "in times before industry . . . men and women were intimate with dust in ways beyond contemporary imagination." Amato is also an intellectual historian, and while wearing that hat he points out that "a grain of house dust is roughly halfway in size between a subatomic particle and the planet Earth." Clearly, there is more to dust than just . . . particles. For a long time, according to "Dust." dust was the smallest thing humans knew of and something they could not control, no matter how much damage it caused to life and health. Peasants inevitably wallowed in dust, and its less reputable cousin dirt, but the aristocrats were nearly as dusty. Since it was, by present standards, dark most of the time, dust could hide. The early modern period began the downfall of dust. First, microscopes discovered things smaller than dust. By the 19th century improved lighting gave dust fewer places to hide. Also by the 19th century, chemistry and materials science gave people (read: housewives) the tools to eliminate dust. Dust was pursued relentlessly, in the home; outside by paving roads and turning yards into lawns; by providing vast amounts of pure water to wash dust away; and by burying garbage in dumps. With the coming of washing soda, people were able to wear bright, colorful clothes, and a dye industry arose to provide them. As time went on, our surroundings were redesigned of novel materials that were unfriendly to dust, like glass, linoleum, galvanized metal. Not everybody was pleased. The Crystal Palace, which was built of glass in London in 1851 to celebrate the modern age., was a wonder of the world -- but also a target of grubby rockthrowers. The friends of dust were on the losing side. "Civilization depends on control of the small," writes Amato, and by 1899 the subatomic age had begun. "In the 20th century, smallness and dust have diverged." Dust attempted a comeback with environmentalists, whose quest for the "natural" necessarily kicked up a lot of dust. Amato's book is a history, not a polemic, but he makes it clear he thinks that returning to the Reign of Dust, with its disease, death and squalor, is nuts. But while "Dust" is not a polemic, it is not exactly a "history," either. Footnotes are as likely to refer to a Time cover as to a study of industrial dusts. The book is more of a long, thoughtful essay than a monograph. Though dust has, in one sense, been vanquished for good, in another Amato predicts it will always remain a benchmark. Philosophers have speculated that our recent knowledge of the very small (and the very big) will change the way we imagine. Perhaps, says Amato, but probably not. "We shape our images to fit our body size, feelings, interests and moral an

This bright and sprightly stroll through the human relationship with the minute comes to a surprisingly dark conclusion. Joseph Amato, Professor of Intellectual and Cultural History at a small college in southwestern Minnesota, tells an interesting, if familiar, tale. Dust was long defined by its occupation of the lowest position on the scale of the visible ('pollen' is the Latin word for 'dust'), and it symbolized insignificance and near-nothingness. Then came Western - now global - science. Dust became a multiform heap of material objects within a certain range of sizes ("With so much known about the invisible, dust can never again be ordinary," he writes), while at the same time ever more powerful instruments pushed ever further toward zero the notion of the infinitesimal. Meanwhile, civil authorities find themselves in a constant scramble to adapt to science's new insights into the implications for human well-being. Prof. Amato is at his best in his survey of these societal responses to the news from the microcosm, and has interesting and upbeat things to say about the history of health, housekeeping, and hygiene. (He is much weaker on the scientific and intellectual side of things. I found particularly regrettable his neglect of Lovejoy's classic *The Great Chain of Being* - a work he cites in the notes but shows no sign of having assimilated.) But the reader who arrives at the end of this brief volume is likely to be surprised at the author's take on the prospects of our increasing mastery of what is minute affecting our imaginative lives. In an essay written in the early twenties entitled "Subject-Matter of Poetry," Aldous Huxley expressed amazement that "The subject-matter of the new poetry remains the same as that of the old. The boundaries have not been extended. There would be real novelty in the new poetry if it had, for example, taken to itself any of the new ideas and astonishing facts with which the new science has endowed the modern world. There would be real novelty in it if it had worked out a satisfactory artistic method for dealing with abstractions. It has not." The concluding chapter of *Dust*, entitled "Who Will Tremble at These Marvels?" attempts to explain why not, and in doing so takes into a minor key what had till then seemed to be a work written in a major mode. This chapter, together with the touching ten-page memoir of his mother's relation to dust presented in an appendix, are the best things in the book.

So much of our world's business energy and investment capital go into information technology and biotechnology, which are fields where most of the important technology is so small as to be invisible to normal human vision. Author Amato explores how the human drive to improve our lives and our world led us (from the 16th century on) to see, measure, manipulate and control ever smaller particles and entities. The mysteries of dust, and then germs, then atoms, and now subatomic particles, viruses and prions, one by one "bit the dust" as they were revealed by this compelling quest. Bearing an amazing array of facts and stories (like the best musty and dusty library stacks I remember from college) as well as an approach both philisophic and humane, Amamto is an entertaining guide on this journey from bulbonic plague to Hoover vacuums to semiconductor plant clean rooms. I think his book helps explain the deep hopes and fears (and the high market valuations) our age invests in our interaction with unseen.

Did you know that each year 332 tons of dust falls on every square mile of Los Angeles? Or that more than twice this amount (782 tons) falls on every square mile of Chicago during the same period? Dust: A History of the Small and the Invisible is chockful of such arcana! Don't get the wrong impression, though. This book is anything but a dry treatise detailing the amount of dust hovering above and raining down over all of us, all we see. The role dust played in humankind's reaction to various airborne diseases (prior to the acceptance of the germ theory at the beginning of the twentieth century) is but one of the many polymathic delights awaiting a reader of this fine book. A friend lent me a copy of this book to read while I was on vacation recently, and I liked it so much that I just HAD to get a copy for myself. I highly, highly, highly recommend this book!

Reading Joseph Amato's "Dust: A History of the Small and the Invisible" is both an eye- and a mind-opening experience. His introduction, entitled "Little Things Mean a Lot," sets the stage for a fascinating discussion of the subtle and profound ways dust (in all its myriad forms) has settled--for better AND worse--humankind's hash throughout history. I especially liked the chapter entitled "Atoms and Microbes: New Guides to the Small and Invisible." I took a chance on this book, hoping that I would come away with a new appreciation of the stuff most of us consider a nuisance.... I did, in spades.